Robot Work Force: A Blessing or a Curse?

Marshall Brain is stirring up more controversy. Roland Piquepaille notes in his
blog that while Brain's last article "Robotic Nation"
warned that robots could displace the human workforce causing massive
unemployment, now he has done a 180 and is promoting the idea as a
Utopian ideal he calls "Robotic
Freedom". Imagine a world in which robots do all the work and humans
are all on permanent vacation (government welfare). Everyone will become
a creative artist and be happy, right? Marshall is a little late
in stumbling onto these ideas. Science Fiction readers have been
pondering this sort of thing
for half a century. And if anyone, including Brain, actually believes
"Robotic Freedom" is a good idea, they should read Jack Williamson's
1947 story, With
Folded Hands and be very, very afraid. "To serve and obey
and guard men from harm..."

Here a couple of previous robots.net articles on the subject of robots
and the workforce:

The cybernetics pioneer Norbert Wiener wrote a book called "the human
use of human beings" on this subject. Doomsters have protested about
the imminent relpacement of human labour by machines for decades (if
not centuries going back to the luddites), but it has never really
happened.

I've worked in industrial automation for a long time, and it is true
that in some industries human labour has been almost entirely replaced,
but the types of work which has been automated were really things that
no sane human being would want to do (things like repetitive
inspection/counting/sorting). In the glass industry where I work its
amaizing to think that people actually did some of the jobs now being
done by robots and computers. Looking back 50-100 years, these were
tasks carried out in extreme heat, vibration and noise and industrial
diseases, accidents and even deaths were commonplace. Only the most
deperate or insane would be able to stand working under those
conditions for long periods of time.